Emily's Blog

What do you call 2 robbers?

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A pair of knickers! :p

If you’re at a beach that doesn’t have lifeguards you need to know how to find rips. Rips pull you out to sea. They are normally in places where the water looks its calmest. If you’re at a beach with lifeguards you need to make sure you’re inside the red and yellow flags.

If you’re caught in a rip swim parallel to the beach, don’t try and swim straight back towards the beach because if you do you will just tire yourself out. The picture below comes from the Surf Life Savers website about beach safety. Here is another link about beach safety in Australia and about rips.

Yesterday we went on a bushwalk at O’Reillys which is inside Lamington National Park. Native birds come every day and people can feed them, we fed some alpacas too. We walked on the treetop walkway, the walkway was really high off the ground and we climbed a long ladder up a tree and when we got to the 2nd floor we were 24 metres off the forest floor, the people who went to the top were 30 metres off the forest floor. The walkways and ladder swayed as you moved.

Then we walked through the gardens and went on a few dirt tracks through the bush for a couple of hours and this is a slideshow of what we saw and here is the sound of some of the birds singing.
The bird sounds are pretty quiet so you might have to turn your speaker up, there’s more near the end.

Bushwalk on PhotoPeach

What do you call a chicken in a shell suit?

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An egg!

When we stay up in Queensland with my Nan and Pop we get to go to the beach lots and play in the sand and swim in the water. We go early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun doesn’t burn you so easily.

Swimming in the surf is lots of fun but you always have to be careful of currents so that you stay in between the red and yellow flags. When you’re in the water you have to look at the beach, at the waves and at the people around you so you are safe.

Today we saw some sandcastles being made, I think they are really nice sandcastles.

Happy New Year!
We went to Kurrawa Beach again this year to watch the early fireworks. This video is the ending of the fireworks we watched.

In Australia different people celebrate Christmas differently. Some celebrate Christmas lots and some don’t at all. Some people open their presents on Christmas Eve, some people open them on Christmas Day and some people like our neighbours open theirs in January. It’s because people in Australia come from all different places around the world.

We open our presents on Christmas morning and we always have a special Christmas lunch but it’s not always the same, but we always have pudding with custard. One of the best bits about the pudding is that we pour the brandy over it and set fire to it.

When we were overseas we saw lots of people getting ready for Christmas. There were all the Christmas markets getting put up and Christmas decorations were being put up in towns. They were selling gingerbread Santa Clauses and advent calendars and on the street there were lots of people selling roasted chestnuts.

We are home now, but there are some places I couldn’t blog about while we were there so I still have some posts about Europe to do. Venice has lots and lots of canals. It is made up of islands and we went on a few boats to get to places because Venice doesn’t have any roads so you have to either walk or catch a ferry. The ferries were very stable even when the waves were hitting them. Our hotel wasn’t on the water but it was very close to it. The Grand Canal goes through Venice and the biggest bridge that crosses it is called the Rialto Bridge, it has shops on it.

We walked across to the other side of the island and caught a ferry to an island called Burano where there are lots of colourful houses.

There is a big square called San Marco and it has lots of big, pretty buildings. It has a big bell tower called the Campanile and it fell down about a hundred years ago and they rebuilt it. We went up the bell tower and we were up there at midday so the bell chimed when we were up there. It was very loud but still awesome.

 We have been in Paris for a week but tonight we are catching an overnight train to Venice. It’s pretty sad leaving Paris and our apartment, but I’m excited to be going to Venice.

Our apartment was opposite Sorbonne University in the 5th arrondissement in the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank. An arrondissement is like a suburb and the left bank means it’s on the left side of the Seine River that runs through the middle of Paris. We were staying very close to the Pantheon and the Luxembourg Gardens.

Nearly every day we walked past Notre Dame Cathedral. Notre Dame is on the island in the centre of the Seine and if you are on the highway in France and it says Paris is 160 km away, it means you are 160km from Notre Dame.

The Louvre is a very big museum and the main courtyard has only three sides. There is a big glass pyramid that you can go onto to get into the museum. In front of the Louvre there is the Tuilieries Gardens, it has lots and lots of statues but we only got to walk through half of it because it was muddy. The mud was the same light colouring as their buildings because it was crushed limestone instead of dirt.

On the other side of the Tuilieries Gardens is the Place de la Concorde, it has a big Egyptian obelisk covered in heiroglyphics that’s about 4000 years old. We walked from the Place de la Concorde up the Champs-Elysee and looked through the Christmas markets so we could go to the Arc de Triomphe.

We went under the road in a tunnel to get to the Arc de Triomphe because the Arc de Triomphe is a roundabout. We climbed up a spiral staircase to get up to the top.

I have a cousin called Paris and I hope she can go to Paris one day too.